That'll work. Now to brain storm how to encourage less passive aggressive play.

There are a lot of fundamental issues with LoL that encourage it. Probably most notably that abilities scale with AP/AD, so that there is little reason to play aggressively earlier rather than later. In DOTA 2, where abilties DO NOT scale it means that there is a window for aggression in the early game by characters with strong abilities.

Combine that with tower aggro mechanics that don't change aggro on spell casts and you can play very aggressively pretty early on and the towers only offer a certain measure of protection. Now LoL players have learned to gank under towers these days anyway, but it's still risky, and it is almost exclusively when a jungler comes to play.

Add in Portal scrolls to allow people to come in to gank/counter gank from anywhere on the map and now the early game is a hell of a lot more dynamic.

This has been building up in me since midway though the 'Spring Split' of the LCS. You know what, FUCK the way professional LoL has been going these days, with the worlds being the latest, and most execrable example. The way LoL is played now at that level is boring as shit.

First of all, IT'S ALL THE SAME MOTHER FUCKING CHAMPIONS!!! Maybe those of you new to the scene don't know, but the game used to be played without the same handful of boring ass OP champions on BOTH teams every damn game.

More champions and more different laning compositions were picked in this Championship than in any other prior. The LCS matches have similarly seen such varying play. This is even excepting the troll games.

It is also hilarious seeing you complain about how games are too fast and the other posters complain they take too long.

Quote from: Margalis

I main support, over the course of the last couple seasons support has gone from ending the game with two major items to one to now often zero. You just buy vision.

I have consistently more items as a support in Season 3 as compared to Season 2.

That'll work. Now to brain storm how to encourage less passive aggressive play.

There are a lot of fundamental issues with LoL that encourage it. Probably most notably that abilities scale with AP/AD, so that there is little reason to play aggressively earlier rather than later. In DOTA 2, where abilties DO NOT scale it means that there is a window for aggression in the early game by characters with strong abilities.

Combine that with tower aggro mechanics that don't change aggro on spell casts and you can play very aggressively pretty early on and the towers only offer a certain measure of protection. Now LoL players have learned to gank under towers these days anyway, but it's still risky, and it is almost exclusively when a jungler comes to play.

Add in Portal scrolls to allow people to come in to gank/counter gank from anywhere on the map and now the early game is a hell of a lot more dynamic.

I am not sure you're playing the same game as me because

1) Early game is super aggressive. The fact that abilities scale of AD/AP has nothing to do with aggression because early/late aggression depends entirely on the relative strength of team compositions.

2) tower aggro does not change aggro on spell casts (unless it was hitting a minion) [though being able to use abilities in order to juggle tower aggro would be a huge increase in dives, but then again you all would just complain that towers go down to fast and everyone tower dives]

3) Making ganks/counter ganks more available from anywhere will tend to decrease aggression. Since its harder to ensure a lop sided fight you're going to tend to be more passive.

1) Early game is super aggressive. The fact that abilities scale of AD/AP has nothing to do with aggression because early/late aggression depends entirely on the relative strength of team compositions.

2) tower aggro does not change aggro on spell casts (unless it was hitting a minion) [though being able to use abilities in order to juggle tower aggro would be a huge increase in dives, but then again you all would just complain that towers go down to fast and everyone tower dives]

3) Making ganks/counter ganks more available from anywhere will tend to decrease aggression. Since its harder to ensure a lop sided fight you're going to tend to be more passive.

Except that all those things are in DOTA and it has a far more aggressive, dynamic early game than LoL does. It also has far more comebacks than LoL does, and generally more interesting games as far as I'm concerned.

In any event, I don't really have any stake in this. I stopped playing LoL ages ago and am less interested than ever in watching it. If you enjoy it, great. Millions of people seem to agree with you.

1) Early game is super aggressive. The fact that abilities scale of AD/AP has nothing to do with aggression because early/late aggression depends entirely on the relative strength of team compositions.

2) tower aggro does not change aggro on spell casts (unless it was hitting a minion) [though being able to use abilities in order to juggle tower aggro would be a huge increase in dives, but then again you all would just complain that towers go down to fast and everyone tower dives]

3) Making ganks/counter ganks more available from anywhere will tend to decrease aggression. Since its harder to ensure a lop sided fight you're going to tend to be more passive.

Except that all those things are in DOTA and it has a far more aggressive, dynamic early game than LoL does. It also has far more comebacks than LoL does, and generally more interesting games as far as I'm concerned.

In any event, I don't really have any stake in this. I stopped playing LoL ages ago and am less interested than ever in watching it. If you enjoy it, great. Millions of people seem to agree with you.

People keep saying this, but as far as i can tell it keeps not being true.

E.G. Game 2 world finals:

SKT T1 takes a commanding lead with a fast, strong dynamic early game punishing the weak early game picks of Royal Club [plus the terrible Sona pick. Stop playing Sona she is terrible]. They group to end the game and the game is turned around at 16 minutes in. Royal Club then dominates until 29 minutes where Godlike gets picked off and SKT cleans up.

While I'd like to see some changes, its hard to pinpoint "where" it needs to be placed for the games to have an equal mix of offensive and defensive play styles. Or maybe moba's don't lend themselves to a truly interesting competitive scene. DOTA2 doesn't play any faster than lol, in fact your snowball mechanics can be worse in some regard. The one thing I'd like to see is riot experiment with gold gain. I think that matters a lot in the back and forth nature of a game like league. Normally games are about denying your opponent gold once you gain the gold advantage. The enemy team is forced to farm whatever meager amount of creep that the snowballing team allows, which can dry up to none depending on how deep the advantage or how good the team is with wards and positioning. Teams play defensive when they lose the gold advantage because they hope to catch up, its easier to pve than to swing the advantage in your favor with more aggressive pvp. Reason why? Because eventually the snowball levels off, so if you just hold out long enough and pve the gold advantages gained before starts to shrink. Everyone knows the snowball has a cap...the problem is great teams don't let you reach the cap or end the game before the cap hits. Stuff like vision and dragon control increases the snowball yes, but the issue is players waiting out the snowball, not the snowball occurring. Though we can nerf what greatly assist snowballing, the more I think about it the less it (nerfing wards) solves the underlining problems with the players play styles and the way the mechanics benefit them.

Any changes riot wants to make needs to make pvp as viable as pve as a way to get back into the game.

I main support, over the course of the last couple seasons support has gone from ending the game with two major items to one to now often zero. You just buy vision.

I have consistently more items as a support in Season 3 as compared to Season 2.

[/quote]

You can personally buy 6 long swords if you want, but at high levels it's very common for supports to buy nothing but vision and boots. I sometimes buy real items just to have fun, but I know that's sub-optimal.

Supports get more gold than before so if you choose to buy real items you can get as many or more than before, but that's typically not a good choice.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.

Major Curse reshuffle. Not sure it'll really pan out. Afromoo and Zekent are the new botlane. Pobelter, who is actually really quite good, is the new solo laner. IWD is back as a jungler (he's meh). Only remaining member is Voyboy. Saint moves to coaching. Nyjacky and Cop go to the new LoLPro team. Edward goes back to Europe.

Afromoo and Zekent, while talented, have always kind of played like shit when money is on the line. It's not like they can do much worse, unless, of course, they fail relegation.

You can personally buy 6 long swords if you want, but at high levels it's very common for supports to buy nothing but vision and boots. I sometimes buy real items just to have fun, but I know that's sub-optimal.

Supports get more gold than before so if you choose to buy real items you can get as many or more than before, but that's typically not a good choice.

I am a platinum support at the moment. If i perma-oracles from 15 minutes the only time i will end up with less than 1 completed item plus sightstone is if the game ends very quickly. Though to be fair, i don't usually buy boots [but also don't run GP/10 quints/yellows either] but that is more because i play so much Janna.

At very very high levels you will tend to see more vision purchased, but this is generally because laning ends earlier and so people need wards to contest objectives (but that is, again, largely fixed by a RSS rush)

Aphro is the kind of player who will get two kills in lane early and get way ahead, then trade them back 2 minutes later for no real reason. I think Voyboy is highly overrated, he makes a lot of poor decisions and he only makes a large impact when he plays carry champions.

That said IWD can't be worse than Saint and Pobelter can't be worse than Jacky. With Jacky when you get down do a pivotal game in a series you know he's going to pick a comfort champion like Morgana and lose the game for free.

I wonder how this will affect their pick/ban phase, which has been pretty horrible. I don't know much about Zekent, maybe he's smart and won't routinely lose the game before it's started. So yeah, I don't expect much, but at the same time it probably can't be much worse than before.

Edit: US teams appear to be just treading water in regards to roster changes. I think a big problem is that there isn't a good source for new talent - high elo solo queue play is largely about being dumb and fucking around, so people plateau at a level well below where they need to be.

« Last Edit: October 09, 2013, 07:02:14 AM by Margalis »

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.

I wonder how this will affect their pick/ban phase, which has been pretty horrible. I don't know much about Zekent, maybe he's smart and won't routinely lose the game before it's started. So yeah, I don't expect much, but at the same time it probably can't be much worse than before.

Zekent probably has the most raw game knowledge of anyone in NA. He is also quite possibly the best Janna in the world (and best Poppy but Poppy isn't strong enough for competitive games). If he can keep Aphromoo in line post laning then they will be a force to be reckoned with. He might not be as good as Xpecial, but he won't be held back by Regi forcing him to pick Sona.

Not necessarily about pro play, but the time has come where those who qualify into Challenger are granted immunity (can't drop out of Challenger) until the end of the season. It wasn't exactly a secret that there were tons of people sitting on their Challenger promo series with super high inflated MMR, waiting for this moment. Now that it's here, there are 23/50 slots (and potentially more as times goes on) in Challenger filled with people who got in just this week.

Not only that, because the player pool is so limited, queues so long, and lots of the top players know each other, there's definitely been at least a few people giving away wins in promo series to guarantee a promotion for their friend.

Arguably, S3 at the Pro level has simply trickled down to everyone else in the form of the sight trinkets, support and jungle changes. The Pros were already doing what is easier for the non-Pros to do now. I think once the Rune changes and whatever else they've got in stock for the true S4 launch go live you'll see the Pros start to change tactics.

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild

Froggen's new team seems pretty awful. For all of the love he gets, he's got a really sad champion pool, and Wickd isn't doing much better. It looks like Fnatic and Gambit will run away with the Euro titles again.

EG picked really poorly. Yasuo is not a good top laner. He gets beaten by bruiser/strong melee. EG picks him top and gets destroyed. Lets XDG camp mid to totally shut down the second assassin with a weak laning phase you picked. Then to top it all off you have jungler which isn't tanky. In team fights XDG just washes over you like a wave. GG

When Coast was playing in the amateur scene to try to get into LCS their strat was pretty much always to send ZionSpartan to split push and they would just win the game for free because the enemy team didn't have any response. I don't think that strategy is going to work in LCS.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.

Innox built Blade of the Ruined King first on Yasuo - a champion who benefits from crit and move speed. (His passive doubles crit chance and the more he moves around the more his shield refreshes)

Maybe he did it because he needed the sustain or something but when that's the first item you buy you probably should have just played a different champion.

That's retarded. Yasuo hits a major power spike with a Shiv. You should always be building a Shiv > IE no matter what. At that point it doesn't matter what you build.

Hydra is also acceptable as a first or second item. The attack reset and high base damage combining with Yasuo's high base scaling is very strong.

On the surface it seems like BotRK would work. Yasuo should like attack speed since his CDR scales on it. He also likes damage since his ult and Q scale on it. The problem is that Yasuo doesn't actually like attack speed all that much because his CDR scales based on his base scaling as well as item scaling. Yasuo works with Shiv not because of shivs attack speed but because of the movement speed and the power of the shiv proc in the early game.

In other news: LCS is mildly entertaining this year. Everyone still looks like fodder for the Koreans. Gambit will be the only team that takes games off them because they can actually team fight worth a damn.

At least TSM won't lose games this year because their midlaner is severely outclassed (Bjergson is actually pretty damn impressive). Of course, Bjerg is having visa issues currently, so we get Regi during super week. Yay.

Mainly because that woman is hillarious. Her schtik is that she is a profesional female gamer (not a GirlGamer) and she is trolling the bottom feeders of the LoL community so hard it is a true joy to watch. I think yesterday her stream had 10000 viewers and every few minutes she got donations ranging from 1-20$. People donate real money to her to get her to read out their retarded messages live on stream.

Yesterday the theme was to get her placement matches behind her so she can start playing ranked this season. So she needed a few games to get her account from level 28 to level 30. She had round about 50 "boost XP gain on a win" booster to her account to achieve that goal.

She was a "professional WoW" gamer before she "found LoL". I love watching her and seeing the retards in chat freak out about her bad plays.

In other news: LCS is mildly entertaining this year. Everyone still looks like fodder for the Koreans. Gambit will be the only team that takes games off them because they can actually team fight worth a damn.

At least TSM won't lose games this year because their midlaner is severely outclassed (Bjergson is actually pretty damn impressive). Of course, Bjerg is having visa issues currently, so we get Regi during super week. Yay.

edit: How the fuck did Gambit lose that.

As much as I am loathe to say it, TSM with Bjergson might actually fare somewhat okay vs international teams. Provided of course they don't just go for the TSM kryptonite, camp Dyrus up top.

Next week is going to be the first international play since worlds, at IEM Katowice. TSM won't be there, but C9 will. The only Korean team there (KTB, my personal favourite team) is looking a little past it though.

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart. Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon

The TSM kryptonite of "camp Dyrus" doesn't work anymore for three reasons

1) Bottom lane is infinitely more important now and easier to gank. Bottom lane is more important because assist streaks mean that successful ganks bottom lane are more productive. Additionally there is an extra member to snowball (who now snowballs really hard on assist streak gold)

2) Its too easy for tanky top laners to turn a kill around on their turret which loses you kills and gives the other team dragon

3) "Camp Dyrus" always depended on Regi being weak because you knew Oddone was going to camp mid for him and you knew roughly that nothing was going to come out of it. This doesn't work anymore because Bjergson and oddone will take advantage of your top camp and snowball the game.

Shit it doesn't even work anymore with Regi since Regi has stopped trying to carry his team and as a result is playing a lot better.